Story by John Coy, Illustrations by Peter McCarty

Night Driving

A warm-hearted portrait of a simple event that encapsulates the bond between a father and a son.

This warm and thoughtful story about a father and son on an all-night drive to the mountains is just right for Father’s Day.

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The Horn Book, starred review

Perfect bedtime beckoning for would-be roamers.

New York Times Book Review
Most picture books are bright, colorful affairs, as noisy as childhood itself, so it comes as a relief when you occasionally encounter a quiet one. If the book is also as fine and thoughtful as ”Night Driving,” which marks the picture-book debut of both the writer John Coy and the illustrator Peter McCarty, it’s worth taking note.
 
Although told in the present tense by its boy narrator, ”Night Driving” occurs in memory, back in the days before the Interstates were finished, when cars were round and fat. The plot is simple. A child and his father are headed for the mountains, where they’ll sleep in a tent. To get there, they drive over the prairies during the night, when it’s cooler and they can have the road to themselves.
 
Unlike the classic children’s tales, this voyage into the dark is not a journey into the subconscious, where wolves and witches lurk and where children do battle alone. In ”Night Driving,” no heart-stopping adventures befall the main characters, no enemies are vanquished, no heroics are required.
 
It’s just an ordinary night full of ordinary things — deer leaping over a roadside fence, a baseball game on the radio, ”the thp, thp, thp of tires rolling over cracks in the road.” For a child, of course, staying up late is an adventure in itself; conquering the night is an important step toward growing up, and doing so with Dad is the stuff of sustaining memory.
 
Mr. McCarty’s subtle black-and-white pencil drawings, which elegantly complement Mr. Coy’s text, are as vague and hazy as night and memory both, and tenderly evoke the father-son relationship at the heart of this book. My favorite illustration depicts a moment by the side of the road when big, gentle-bodied Dad leans against the car, patiently watching his little boy show off his fastball by hurling a stone into the blackness.
 
There’s not a forced or false moment, not even when, far into the night, Dad reminisces about his own father, the child’s dead grandfather, a lefty who might have played in the big leagues if he hadn’t hurt his arm: ”My dad stops talking, and I know he’s thinking about his dad. . . . We drive awhile in silence, and I listen to the hum of the engine.’’
 
Mr. Coy’s prose is spare but not without feeling, and his young narrator has a poetic bent, comparing the moon to a giant’s night light and the car to a mouth gobbling up the road. Otherwise the hours pass and nothing much happens, just the miracle of being in a car alone with Dad, playing car games, changing a flat and learning how to find Polaris in the starry sky.
KIRKUS

Staying up all night is one of those small yet significant childhood rites of passage, a first glimpse at adulthood, recreated here by two picture-book newcomers. A father and son drive all night to the mountains. In a narrative comprised of a series of moments rather than events, they listen to baseball, watch mule deer, and drive without headlights, with only the moon “like a giant’s night light.” More a coming- of-age memory than a story, the nocturnal sojourn is complete with the boy’s first sip of coffee, a flat tire, stargazing, and a visit to a diner. The black-and-white pencil on paper drawings are stark yet soft, like those in Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984). Each one is striking in composition, reminiscent of a photograph, preventing the story from being just another piece of nostalgia. A series of hushed, starlit illustrations creates the impending sense that magic is just around the bend. While adults may appreciate this look at an uncomplicated childhood, younger readers will find the text soothing and the parent/child companionship reassuring. 

Book of the Times

Turning Pages to Children’s Pleasures

…The narrator and his father drive all night to get to the mountains where they plan to camp out. They talk, they listen to a baseball game, they sign, they stop for breakfast in a diner. Soft gray pencil drawings capture the moonlit world through which they make their sleepy way to the sound of “the thp, thp, thp of tires rolling over the cracks in the road.”…

Readers' Theater Script